Show HN: PDF reflow in the browser with local AI model

appblit.com

6 pointsldenoue5 comments

this app runs entirely in your browser. thanks to Codex, it now uses a YOLO detector using ONNX to detect regions in each rendered PDF page image (text, pictures, formulas, tables). based on this analysis, PDF Reflow then cuts out TEXT regions into tiny little word images and adds back the original text from the PDF (when available) so you can still select and find text in the reflowed HTML render.

Hope you find this useful. The original version used heuristics, but frankly it was breaking on many more PDF that I'd want to admint.

This new AI-based version that uses a YOLO detector trained specifically on Doc Layout dataset seems to do a very very good job.

Did you find tune a model?

Not yet. for now this one from Alessandro works well: https://huggingface.co/Armaggheddon/yolo26-document-layout

Converted to ONNX of course, and also CoreML for the iOS app. I haven't yet tried on Android. Does it work for you if you have an Android phone?

Works fine for me on android.

I notice some inconsistent behavior with the placement of footnotes sometimes occurring inline with the text. That's kind of a tough edge case.

do you have sample PDFs?

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